Kurt DelBene

Recent Articles

As the Obama administration makes strides to improve the functionality of HealthCare.gov, the flagship website for the Affordable Care Act, Republican lawmakers continue to block federal funds that would help millions of poor Blacks get health insurance coverage. A progress report on the improved performance of HealthCare.gov cited hundreds of software bugs that generate errors and hardware and infrastructure ill-equipped to handle any significant volume of traffic to the site. “For some weeks in the month of October [2013], the site was down an estimated 60 percent of the time,” stated the progress report. Two months later, after insiders revealed that the site crashed on a test run with just a few hundred concurrent users, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) officials said the site is more stable and can handle 50,000 users at a time. Anton Gunn, director of external affairs in the Office of Intergovernmental and External Affairs (IEA) at HHS, said that in the first two months, 1.2 million Americans selected marketplace health insurance plans or they received a determination that they were eligible for Medicaid or the children’s health insurance program. Continue Reading →